Shahid Malik - Escapologist!

We'd been wondering what our old mate Shahid Malik, the Labour MP for Dewsbury, has been up to since we last reported on his travails relating to his expenses claims which are generally considered to be, at best, slightly shifty if not outright fraudulent.

Shahid Malik - wizard!
Image adapted from one at Unyclopedia, used according to Creative Commons license.

Shahid, as we all know, was forced to step down from the Cabinet (which is politician-speak for "asked to go") when the Daily Telegraph revealed that they were ever so slightly confused over precisely which of his properties was his second home since he seemed to be spending most of his time at the one he said it was - this, according to Parliamentary rules, means that he ought to declare it as his first home and be responsible for the maintenance himself. Next thing you know, people were accusing him of trying to get the tax-payer to fund his luxury lifestyle, which was all a bit unfair - after all, why should our man with his £95,617 per annum salary be expected to pay for his own big television and massage chair? Some people thought he might have been renting his constituency flat - owned by a personal friend of his - at a preferential rate too, which would have been frowned upon as well, because MPs are required to mention things like that.

Poor old Shahid then had to go through the indignity of being investigated by a Parliamentary Standards Commissioner, and things were looking bad. But, as luck would have it, he was found not guilty even though he couldn't provide proper records to show what he'd been paying - either way, Gordon Brown gave him a nice new job in his freshly reshuffled Cabinet. Hurray!

But the big bad bullies at the Telegraph hadn't finished with him yet, and they started saying that Shahid had also been claiming for two different sets of office space - and what's more, one of them formed part of his house and that's not allowed either. Now they say that he claimed £1015 more than he should have done to cover the cost of his Council Tax too, which Mr. Brown is going to feel a bit embarrassed about because when he gave Shahid his new job, he made him Under-Secretary of State for Communities and, in that role, guess what he's partly responsible for...? Yep - Council Tax!

There's an old saying: shit sticks. It means that, if you can stir up enough controversy around a subject, some of it will forever be associated with that subject. Another old saying maintains that there's no smoke without fire, which means that if there is indication of something happening, then something is happening. Mr. Malik has now been so entangled in the expenses furore that even if he was able to produce miraculous evidence that proved he's done nothing but behave better than a shock-trained labrador on Ritalin, he'd still have a faint dodgy whiff about him for the rest of his career. Anyway, all these stories of his supposed impropriety couldn't all be false, could they? There must be a grain of truth, somewhere...

That last paragraph nakes him look a bit of a political albatross all in all, and you have to wonder why the Prime Minister - who has been working hard to clean up his battered government in the hope that they won't take quite such a kicking come the General Election as they did in the recent local and European elections even though he knows they cannot possibly win - might want someone of whom the electorate now have a deep suspicion in his Cabinet. Mr. Malik is beginning to look like the star pupil of Lord Mandelson's Surviving Scandals and Damage Limitation Academy.

So anyway, back to the story. As we were saying, we were just wondering what Shahid's been doing with himself for the last week or so since the censored expenses details were published, knocking him out of the headlines so we Googled his name. We haven't had sight nor sound of him since then and he hasn't even popped round for a cup of tea since...er, well, he just hasn't popped round for a cup of tea.

But guess what we found on Google? Shahid Malik - magician, illusionist and escapologist, no less! Suddenly, everything is clear!

Well, bugger me! They must be related to one another, surely? The likeness is far too great for them not to be family!

Brown "hurt" by recent attacks

Prime Minister Gordon Brown has spoken of the "hurt" he has felt over recent attacks made against him, his leadership and his Government, especially those that came during the unsuccessful attempts to push him out of office that took place just after Labour's disastrous election results.

Poor Gordy's been feeling a bit sad of late. Perhaps we should all be kinder to him...nah, sod it. Let's give him hell.
Picture adapted from a Public Domain image from Wikipedia.

Mr. Brown suggests that recent weeks have been the most upsetting he has ever had to endure, adding that: "To be honest, you could walk away from all of this tomorrow," he said. "I'm not interested in what accompanies being in power. I wouldn't worry if I never returned to all those places - Downing Street, Chequers..." So remember, folks, don't give up now - we could still get rid of him. Oh, and by the way - we don't know why he said "you could walk away" rather than "I could," either.

He also indicates that he finds it hard to plan strategically. "You have to deal with immediate events, like if a bank's going to go under," he told a Guardian interviewer. That's a bit like a chef admitting they find it hard to make bechamel sauce or a rabbi who spends all day blogging about politics instead of reading the Torah - it's a basic requirement of the job. Do you think that just maybe you're the wrong man for the task, Mr. Brown? He then claims that there is a sense of "common purpose" between Lord Mandelson and himself to change the party for the better, saying "people are coming to appreciate his talents in a way the Labour party didn't before ... I think there's a great affection for him now." That may be true amongst his new Cabinet, formed of MPs either too moronically loyal or depressingly spineless to stand up to him in any way, but many back-benchers and the electorate absolutely loathe Mandelson, believing him to be nothing more than the slimy little toe-rag a look at the various scandals he's been involved in seem to suggest he is.

However, despite his introspection, he still seems unaware that the public have lost all trust in Parliament and are very unlikely to ever regain it. "You're in that period between the implementation of your policy and the delivery of it," he says, evidently believing that the horse might be hiding under a strand of straw at the back of the stable somewhere and he bolted the door just in the nick of time. Unfortunately, Mr. Brown's time in office will forever be remembered as the time when Parliament fell apart, revealing corruption and rotteness within so that the British people realised once and for all that MPs can never be trusted.

"Foreign policy can never be the same again," he believes, adding that "you cannot have Rwanda again ... foreign policy can no longer be the province of just a few elites." This week's terrible events in Iran, he says, are "a reminder of the way that people are using new technology to come together in new ways to make their views known." Oh yes, Mr. Brown - we're onto you. What's more, it's now possible for us to access far larger amounts of information than either your Government or any other has ever allowed us in the past. That means we can form our own opinions, rather than being steered in the direction that the Government wants us to take.

He has also said that he is considering a radical career move when he leaves office, possibly going into teaching. For God's sake, Gordon, you have kids of your own - do you know what evil little bastards children are? If you've found the last few weeks upsetting you're not going to last two minutes in a classroom. Children are not innocent beings full of happiness and light; they're horrible, vicious, vindictive little demons who will ceaselessly and without mercy attack you every minute of every school day for any weakness or physical defect they believe you to have. Things thought by children to be examples of weakness and physical defects include: being famous, having an accent (Scottish children will not hesitate to savagely rip the piss out of you for having a Scottish accent), having a surname that can be in any way even remotely connected to body functions ("Brown" is going to make you an irresistably easy target) and being a teacher. Basically, imagine yourself in a Commons debate. Now, instead of reasonably civilised adult human beings who can generally be silenced with a single "Order" from the Speaker, imagine that you are surrounded by around 30 criminally-minded midgets, each of whom has a pathological hatred for you and all you represent, all of them avidly awaiting their first chance to stab you with an HB pencil which they almost certainly poked into some dog turd on the schoolfield during playtime because you taught them about bacteria last week and they now know what e-coli does. We're talking about people (for want of a more accurate term) even more psychotic than some of the weirdest independent back-benchers here.

Then, if you even so much as dare to raise your voice to one of them, they'll tell their multiply-Asbo'd father (who hasn't had a job since he was made redundant in 2008 and blames you personally for it) that you touched them inappropriately so then he'll be waiting at the school gates for you the next morning wanting "a little word", which, in case you're not familar with popular slang amongst the English working classes, translates as "to kick so many shades of shit out of you that shittologists will declare it a major scientific breakthrough". For f*ck's sake mate, nobody likes you but we wouldn't wish that sort of life on anyone, not even you. Get yourself on the guest speaker circuit like all the other retired PMs do - if you've been upset by the last few weeks, you definitely haven't got the guts for teaching.

A post NOT titled "Fall of Ussher," which is what all the newspapers are going to call their reports on the story

It would have been a surprise had we have not seen at least one more minister exiting the Cabinet yesterday as the Government prepared for the inevitable storm due today with the publication of a full list of MPs' expenses (well, almost full - some of the most damaging details are going to be left out, it seems, so whether or not the data is worth the paper it's printed on is a matter of personal choice and faith in the Government) over the last four years, not least from the Labour party where Prime Minister Gordon Brown is doing all he can - with the exception of saying the voters will get to read a full, unedited version of the report on the system due in October - to convince us that he understands our anger and will do something about it.

That sacrificial victim was Kitty Ussher (pictured right), junior Treasury Minister, who is reported to have "flipped" homes, as so many MPs have, in order to avoid paying Capital Gains Tax. Ms. Ussher represents Burnley, where she had what was designated as her main home - defined by Commons guidelines as the one at which an MP spends most nights and the costs of which the MP is responsible for - and a second home in South London, designated as her second home, for which she has been entitled to claim expenses as a property closer to Westminster than the constituency home is deemed necessary for many MPs to attend Parliament as regularly as they are required to do.

However, in 2007 Ms. Ussher decided it was time to sell the residence in Burnley. If you have two homes, selling one leaves you liable to pay Capital Gains Tax on profit made from the sale (£40,000 in this case) so on the advice of her accountant Ms. Ussher changed the designation, making the house in Burnley her second home for one month. That meant that when it sold, she could make a claim from the Commons to cover the tax - a move which saved her somewhere between £9750 and £16,000. The Daily Telegraph has a copy of the letter in which Ms. Ussher's accountant advised this and has published it today.

Ms. Ussher is understood to have contacted Gordon Brown and though "flipping" homes is legal, he told her that by taking advantage of the loophole for personal gain she would no longer be considered a suitable candidate to stand as a minister. She has since said that she will stand down as an MP at the next General Election, a decision she puts down to the pressure of combining her work as an MP and Minister in addition to being the mother of two young children. She has already been under scrutiny after it emerged that she claimed £20,000 for Artex textured paint to be removed from the walls of her London home - though Acid Rabbi fully understands the need to rid all the world's buildings of the horror of Artex (and would fully support a new law banning it forever, especially if that law was extended to fake-Tudor pubs), Ms. Ussher really should have paid for this herself, or better still got herself down to B&Q for a big tub of Polycell Smoothover.

The Minister had been employed at the Treasury up until last October, from where she was moved to the Department of Work and Pensions and put in charge of housing benefit. The recent Cabinet reshuffle, during which Mr. Brown surrounded himself with people either loyal to him or too spineless to stand up to him - and, oddly, Peter Mandelson, surely a piranha in a tank of guppies - in an attempt to form a sort of human shield insulating himself from attacks upon his leadership, saw her back with the Treasury again. An enconomist known for her pleasant and likable manner, Ms. Ussher was tipped for the top, and it is a pity that she has been revealed as just yet another money-grabber.

The New Cabinet

Well, here we are at the end of what must be one of the most remarkable (and, for those of us who like seeing politicians squirming in deep shit, incredibly funny) days in Parliament ever. The ruling party are taking the hammering of their lives as yesterday's election results come in, seeing Labour absolutely thrashed by the Tories and looking pretty damn unhealthy next to the LibDems too. Four MPs have had enough and have thrown in the towel (and if we don't see at least one more go by the stroke of midnight I'll be surprised) and Gordon Brown, desperate to make something worthwhile out of what is left of his party, has been reshuffling like mad in an attempt to try to insulate himself from the ever-growing number of back-benchers who are baying for his blood and gearing themselves up for a leadership contest.

The famous green leather is going to take a while to cool off tonight - it's been a busy day in the Commons.
Image from Wikipedia, used under regulations detailed here.

Here's the new Cabinet:

Prime minister: Gordon Brown

Leader of the Commons: Harriet Harman

First secretary of state: Lord Mandelson

Chancellor of the exchequer: Alistair Darling

Foreign secretary: David Miliband

Justice secretary: Jack Straw

Home secretary: Alan Johnson

Environment, food and rural affairs secretary: Hilary Benn

International development secretary: Douglas Alexander

Communities and local government secretary: John Denham

Children, schools and families secretary: Ed Balls

Energy and climate change secretary: Ed Miliband

Health secretary: Andy Burnham

Northern Ireland secretary: Shaun Woodward

Leader of the Lords: Lady Royall of Blaisdon

Minister for the Cabinet Office, the Olympics and paymaster general: Tessa Jowell

Scotland secretary: Jim Murphy

Work and pensions secretary: Yvette Cooper

Chief secretary to the Treasury: Liam Byrne

Wales secretary: Peter Hain

Defence secretary: Bob Ainsworth

Transport secretary: Lord Adonis

Culture, media and sport secretary: Ben Bradshaw

David Miliband looked set for the chop just a couple of days ago, but after expressing his support for the beleaguered PM, he's been able to hang on to the position that indications showed was going to serve as a way for Mandelson to slime his way back into the Cabinet. Naturally, he's managed to do so anyway with a brand new position created just for him: First Secretary of State. Honestly, how the hell does he do it? (Not through honesty, at any rate). Put it this way...imagine you were asked to leave your job over some trifling matter such as, hmm, £373,000. Yet, for reasons beyond the comprehension of mere mortals, your boss decided to give you another job. But you screwed up again and were made to resign a second time because you did a bit of dodgy dealing to get your mate into the company, even though this mate had previously been involved in a massive scandal with his former employer. Not even the most incompetent boss would take you on a third time, surely?

But in Mandelson's case...well, back up he pops like a zombie when you've only shot it through the body instead of the head. Does the man have a philosopher's stone or something?